Typical nutrition tracking processes require detailed input regarding the amount of food intake for each participant. Data entry for these processes is often free-form in nature, time-consuming, error-prone, and cannot be completed in temporal proximity to the food consumption. For example, a food item consumed by a participant must be written down, typed out, or selected from a large collection of available food items. Moreover, a determination of the amount of the food item consumed must be recorded in order to correctly determine nutrition intake from the consumed food items. Many existing processes utilize measurements in grams, ounces, government-recommended serving sizes, and the like. Obtaining the correct amount of food item consumption is thus cumbersome, often inaccurate, and/or requires measuring use of devices such as scales or measuring cups.
These problems with current approaches to nutrition tracking are further compounded when rapid data entry of food intake for several participants is needed. For example, in order to track food intake of a group of students, a teacher or aid needs an efficient data entry system that minimize the amount of time diverted from class instruction. Thus, there remains a need for nutrition tracking and analytics systems having improved data entry capabilities.